ALTERED OZ CELEBRATION

The long anticipated day is finally upon us.

Thank you for joining with me for this Altered Oz celebration. The opportunity to come together in celebrating one of my favorite places fictional though it may be is an opportunity I could not resist. If you were here with me for the last Oz party you know I’m serious when I say I love anything and everything Oz so when my dear friend Oma Linda mentioned the Altered Oz party I was one of the first to say, “Count me in.”

Getting to this party wasn’t an easy journey for me and just so you can see how difficult it was I’m going to share with you how I ended up here today. The following is a true story and the real version of what happened.

It all started with that post on Oma Linda’s blog announcing the celebration. I didn’t let a little thing like the fact that I don’t do altered art and have no idea what it really is deter me. Nope, that’s just not my style. I was confident that I could figure it out and put something together. I’ll be the first to admit I’ve always been a bit cocky and perhaps over confident.

I know that there are probably established rules and guide lines that are well known and understood by just about everyone in the known universe except for yours truly. That doesn’t bother me too much because I’m pretty sure there are a few things I know about and understand that you don’t. Besides, I’ve always been good at following instructions and I figured I’d just Google Altered and find everything I would need.

By reading up on the subject I gathered that quite often an object is given a new purpose or look by adding other elements to it to create something else entirely. That is all well and good if you know what that means but it isn’t something I easily understand and I haven’t the foggiest notion of what to do with this little bit of knowledge. It didn’t help reading more on the subject or looking at images of altered art that others had created. I just don’t get it. Okay, okay I’m not quite as smart as I thought.

You’d think that with all of the images of Altered Art that I’ve seen on the blogs I’ve visited I would learn something but no, those images don’t help me either. I have no idea how you decide what to do or how you go about doing it. I must have missed something crucial in the articles I read. I’ll have to accept that I’m simply clueless at times and this is one of those times.

I’m admitting my ignorance and am telling you that I am aware that this isn’t altered art in its true form but it is to me how Oz would appear in an altered universe. Yes, I believe in alternate and parallel universes.

I have put together six scenes in which Dorothy and Toto or Dorothy alone may appear if we were able to see into these altered worlds. The scenes were all done with watercolor pencils on a mixed media paper. I then planned on putting these drawings together in book form or some sort of journal.

I am truly in awe of those of you who put together journals and make little books with pages because it’s a whole lot harder than one who has never done such a thing can even imagine. At least it was for me. I should have started with a ready-made book or journal but that is hindsight. 

At first I thought I knew what I was doing but hadn’t gotten far into the project before I realized I had no idea what I was doing. My project was suddenly dead in the water and I had no idea of how to save it. I thought I’d have to come up with something else but when I tried to think of something else I discovered that my mind had been wiped clean of anything and everything.

There was nothing! Just a big fat zero! All I had was a vast empty space without thought or reason or a single solitary idea. This empty space where once there had been all of these ideas jumbled together just waiting to be let out. I must have come into contact with a large industrial sized magnet that wiped out any creativity or ideas that I once had. I don’t recall doing so but what other explanation do I have? I’d have to stick with my one and only idea for my part in this celebration or admit defeat which is something I’m loath to do.

I’m one of those people who know that if you ignore something it will go away. I also know that if something is causing you a problem instead of getting frustrated trying to fix it if you put it off to the side more than likely a solution or remedy will present itself or you’ll merely forget there ever was a problem. Some people call this avoidance but I am not one of those people. It’s a practice that has always worked well for me. So that is what I did and I wasn’t even a wee bit surprised when an idea just POPPED into that empty space. Things started coming together. I was going to have something to show after all and hopefully you wouldn’t be too disappointed with my offering.

So here is what I ended up with:

and everything fits inside of this.

If you would like to be the one who gets to see firsthand what this journal really looks like leave me a comment saying so.  I plan on letting one of you take this little bit of silliness off my hands. I will choose and announce the winner on Sunday March 17^th.

To see what everyone else who has entered into the merriment has to offer go over to my dear friend Oma Linda’s blog, Olde Baggs ‘n Stuft Shirts for a list of all of the participants by clicking here or clicking on the Altered Oz button on my side bar..

Thank you for taking the time to visit and for joining me in celebrating Oz. Just your being here makes it all worth while.

“Now what do you suppose that was all about?”

”There’s no telling with that one. She’s a bit off if you ask me. That drawing of me wearing Dorothy's dress is making my skin itch.”

COLORED PENCILS

I like colored pencils and it seems I need to have lots and lots of them in my possession for me to feel I have enough of them. Because I had never counted them and had no idea of how many there were in that box where I keep them I was content.  I knew there were a lot of pencils and all was fine in my little corner of the world and life was good.

I have soft leaded pencils that go on smoothly and blend with one another beautifully. I have pencils with harder lead that play nicely with one another and I now have a fair number of water color pencils that I can use with or without water with great results either way.

I have pencils that were very inexpensive and pencils that I bought one at a time because they were that expensive. Some of my pencils have been with me for a very long time and some were purchased only recently. The ones I like best are my Faber Castell Design Spectracolor pencils. They go on so smoothly and shading and blending with these pencils makes working with them a pleasure. Those may be my favorites but I like all of my other pencils too.

One day last week I decided to make color charts of my pencils. This is the type of project that a person does when she is bored or is having a problem with a project and needs to take a break and do something that doesn’t require any brain work so an idea for solving said problem might formulate in those little gray cells.

Anyway, back to the pencils and the color charts. Once the charts were filled in I went a step further and for some reason I cannot explain I counted the pencils. Big mistake!!

I shouldn’t have done that because once counted they had a number and now I have to decide if I really need that set of 72 pencils that I have been thinking about buying. How do you know if what you have is enough? Right now I have 254 colored pencils. Is that enough? Maybe there are colors out there that I could really use and if I had them perhaps my drawings would look so much better than they do now. Perhaps I’ll find some pencils that I like even better than my beloved Faber Castell Design Spectracolor pencils. 254 pencils don’t sound like all that many pencils now, does it?  Have I been deluding myself into thinking I have a lot of pencils? I’ll bet everyone else who works in colored pencil has twice that many. I really do need to buy that set of 72 pencils.....don’t I?

When the color charts and the counting was finished and I still hadn’t come up with a solution to the problem with the other thing I was working on I devised another way to waste spend my time. I decided to do a drawing using only one type of colored pencil for the whole drawing rather than mixing different types together the way I usually do. I decided that I’d do this with each type of pencils. That should keep my mind of the weather and give it time to work out that solution to the aforementioned problem with the project that is at a dead end and needs to be completed for a very important event that is coming up on the 15th of this month.

So……………………. here’s the first drawing. I had to take photos because the scanner doesn’t work well with the drawings still in the tablet. It might help if you click on the photos to enlarge them. Then again it may be no help at all.

I used my Martha Stewart colored pencils for this one and it’s the first time I’ve used these pencils. I really enjoyed working with these pencils and can see myself using them often. I love the names of some of the colors. Leave it to Martha to come up with a color called rhubarb. The photo does not do justice to the colors.

For this one I used my Prismacolor or Eagle Verithins. The paper I’m working on is a vellum surface mixed media paper and not the paper I would normally use when working with these pencils but the results are okay if not spectacular. Again I must apologise for the photography and  tell you that the colors are not this washed out on the actual drawing.

 This last one was done using my favorite Faber Castell Design Spectracolor pencils. The one problem I see with using them alone is they have a softer lead that does not come to a fine point when sharpened so fine line detail is a bit of a problem and again, I would normally use these pencils on another type of paper.

I still have 5 more pencil brands or types and the solution to the problem with that dumb project still hasn’t resolved itself so I may make this into a series of mother and child mermaids. If I buy those other pencils I may end up with a series of 9 drawings….or not.

I do hope you are having a good day and as always, thanks for stopping by.

TWO NEW DOLL BABIES

I’ve been playing in the sewing room and have two new little baby dolls to add to my doll family. Now that I think about it I seem to have a habit of doing two of whatever it is I’m making at a time. I wonder if that means something……. probably not.

For whatever reason my dolls are almost always children but it’s been years since I made baby dolls. Back in the 1980s I took commissions for Cabbage Patch style dolls and all of those were babies or toddlers but since then these two little dolls are my first attempts at making babies.

Both of these babies are barely over 10 inches long which makes them much smaller than the ones I used to make. Jamie is a chubby baby boy with pale blue eyes. Since he has no hair and this house is quite cool this time of year I’ve made him a cap to match his sweater. He still needs some booties or shoes but right now he’s at the age where he’d be trying to pull them off and I do so love sweet little baby feet.

The baby girl Kimie is not as chubby and is dressed in only a sweater and diaper. I’d thought of making her a bonnet or hat but why cover all of that honey blond hair? Her eyes are a darker shade of blue than Jamie’s.

The way these two have been constructed allows them to be posed to assume many positions.

As fun as it was to make these two I don’t know if I’ll be making any more. Two seems to be my limit these days.

The other day I broke down and visited the craft store. I know I said I wasn’t going to go until I used up some of the supplies on hand but I’m weak and have no self-control!  I’m kidding.  I actually have tons of self-control. Really I do. Serious self-control… Anyway, back to the trip to the craft store. I went for one certain item, make that two items. A set of water color pencils and some water color paper.

I may have superior self-control but I'm also very suggestable.  After seeing what two of my friends posted on their blogs showing what they had been doing with water color pencils I wanted to join in on the fun. So far I haven’t had much success so I won’t be showing you anything right now. Maybe I’ll never have anything that is worth sharing but I am having fun playing around and wasting paper.

You should visit my friend Karen Anne at Ireland Brady and see the beautiful series of Bitty Betta Fish she’s just finished. They are amazing.  I also suggest that you visit Pam at yoborobo to see what she has been doing with her new Inktense water color pencils. These two talented artists have made working with water color pencils look easy but it really isn't so easy for some of us.  

Wishing you a happy week and as always, thanks for stopping by.